I’m proud to have joined the fantastic team building what will be the largest planetarium in the world when it opens in 2020. I’ll be leading the user experience design across all devices and interactive exhibits (the vast majority of the museum), including the direction of a modern and accessible component library.

It took a few months, but it’s finally done. This was my first “real” woodworking project. It’s inspired me to pursue some real education in the skill and I’m excited to start work on the next project!

Before showing the final piece, I thought it would be useful to see the “before” pic:

This corner was awkward at best, but it had potential as a little breakfast nook!

I’m pleased that I can finally share a project I’ve been working on for the last year with illustrator Guy Shield and former principal engineer of iPhone software, Ken Kocienda. I’ve wanted to work with Guy for nearly a decade, and this felt like the perfect project. Creative Selection is a book told from a uniquely first-person perspective. While we had to settle for black and white, the images still serve their purpose—transporting you to important moments throughout Ken’s time at Apple, from the birth of Safari to the iPhone, and beyond.

And the reviews are pretty good, too:

“I’ve literally been waiting a decade for this book. Ken Kocienda takes you inside Apple in way only a true insider, a veteran software developer, could. Creative Selection is the answer to the prayer uttered by anyone who wants to truly understand how Apple works. I couldn’t put it down.”

Adam LashinskyNew York Times bestselling author of Inside Apple

“I’d be interested in the behind-the-scenes story of any Apple product. But if there is one I’m most interested in, it’s the iPhone. Kocienda delivers just that, and it truly is extraordinary. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in how Apple actually creates its products.”

John GruberDaring Fireball

“Ken Kocienda played pivotal roles in the creation of both Safari and the original iPhone. One of the hardest problems―and biggest risks―of the first iPhone was the development of a multi-touch keyboard. I placed this formidable responsibility squarely in Ken’s hands, and the success of the keyboard emerged from his insights, collaboration, and dogged pursuit of excellence. He now offers readers, in his own words, a window into his experiences and insights from the trenches.”

Scott ForstallOriginal iPhone Software Team Leader and SVP iOS, Apple

“Creative Selection is simply the best book I've read so far about Apple.”

After four years of working with the wonderful editors at Foreign Affairs, it is time to move on. We’ve come a long way from the first cover, when they were using stock photography, despite the beautiful redesign Pentagram did of their print publication. I’ve never been more proud of a body of work (you can check out most of them here), and I’m grateful for the opportunity Gideon Rose and the Council on Foreign Relations gave me to lead the Foreign Affairs brand into a new era. This will be my last cover, and I’m proud to have worked on it with one of my favorite illustrators, the ever-brilliant Dan Bejar.

Working with Ben and Adam to transform the astoundingly talented Brandon Bird’s original painting into their 2018 tour poster was a lot of fun. All done with Apple Pencil, Procreate, and a smidge of Photoshop and Illustrator.

I got a little too into the details on this… my best approximation of 1980’s airbrushing.

The original painting I started with, by the astoundingly talented Brandon Bird.

I think my favorite part may have been reading their fans’ reactions on Reddit and Twitter:

I had the wonderful opportunity to collaborate with the fabulous Ricardo Martinez of El Mundo. This has been a complicated time for international relations, and creating a powerful cover that did not focus on the character of Trump was important to keeping the larger situation in perspective. Together we set out to create a cover that captured that story powerfully and succinctly.

While we've had our work featured on The Colbert Report before, this is a first — Rachel Maddow featured our May/June 2017 cover prominently this week, quoting extensively. Powerful stuff — so proud of how this turned out and grateful to have worked with the talented Thomas Danthony on such a poignant cover!

Quoting Maddow:"Do you sleep too much or too well? Are you too relaxed? Do you have low blood pressure? A lack of anxiety? Not a care in the world? If so, there's a cure for that. Foreign Affairs is out with a new issue today, it's titled "Present at the Destruction? Trump in Practice." It's illustrated with this handy sort-of-pictogram of… maybe that's Air Force One jetting directly into… I dunno? Volcanic eruption? Mushroom cloud? Giant mountain? End of the world? You get the idea. And that picture and that title set the tone for the content of this new issue of Foreign Affairs.

There's a detailed look at the initial behavior of this new president on foreign affairs and how if that behavior continues that could lead directly to three brand-new separate wars with three different countries. There's also a long piece about why the experts believe you probably don't have to worry about an immediate descent into full-on fascism any time soon but yeah, we are maybe sliding into what the experts might call a "competitive authoritarianism." Oh.

The editor of Foreign Affairs is Gideon Rose. He opens this hair-raising collection today with this question — it's actually a game, more than a question — the game is "Stupid or Nefarious?"

Quote: "Every administration spins, fights with the press and the bureaucracy, pushes its own agenda, and tries to evade intrusive oversight. But ordinary White Houses do not repeatedly lie, declare war on mainstream media institutions, pursue radical goals while disdaining professional input, and refuse to accept independent scrutiny… how seriously you take these behaviors depends on how you assess the motivations behind them, generating a game that some have taken to calling 'Stupid or nefarious?' …Do slow appointments to the administration signal poor management or a deliberate attempt to 'deconstruct the administrative state' …Is dismissing experienced senior officials en masse just a clumsy way of handling a presidential transition or a purge of potential obstacles and whistleblowers? …Are all the lies mere venting or a deliberate plot to distract critics and undermine reasoned discourse?"

That's your choice — stupid or nefarious? Stupid or nefarious. I would like to take door number three, please. If those are my options."— Rachel Maddow

Let’s start with a painfully obvious statement: building great products is hard.

Countless strategies have been popularized to increase the chances of success in product development, from open-source frameworks and Agile development, to dev-ops and user-centered design. Yet, mitigating and navigating the many issues that arise in creating a new product — and within the team building it — can feel like an exercise in futility, like a bumbling Roomba that just can't escape from under the couch.

That may sound hyperbolic to executives or those outside the product team, but it’s reality. There are innumerable challenges which frameworks, processes, designs, or developer ingenuity can’t ever solve. That's because these "challenges" are better described as turning points — missteps, continental divides, and forks in the road — that can quickly become exponentially impossible to undo in the ever-forward march of a product's progress.

Everyone has the opportunity and responsibility to help the team avoid these turning points. But it takes vigilance, tension, argumentation, transparency, and above all, a willingness to change perspective. All of that is facilitated by a commitment to open and honest communication, something that’s surprisingly difficult for larger teams.

The shamefully obvious reality is that clear communication between all the people involved in making software, from founders and the c-suite to researchers and the QA team, is the panacea that most teams need. UX teams are uniquely positioned to serve this role, and as designers it is their duty to be the clearest communicators in the room — but if the rest of the organization isn't committed to communication and collaboration, one team's honesty can often be seen as another team's greatest threat.

Too often, people try to forget, give up, move on, or gradually justify their desires to do so. And each day, that fork in the road gets further away in our rear view mirrors — momentum takes hold, and talking about the wrong turn we took back there seems more and more pointless. After communication breakdown, sunk-cost fallacy is every product's greatest enemy. It’s critical to identify that wrong turn before, or soon after, it’s made. Otherwise, inertia sets in and it’s harder and harder to correct course.

This is complicated by the necessity to tolerate tension. It takes a commitment to stay the course, and patience on behalf of the leadership to avoid thrashing and dramatic pivots. The old “how can we deliver more, faster” question causes almost any team to cringe.

This is the reason companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon often encourage rampant creativity and experimentation at a small scale, while in most cases discouraging quick and drastic changes at a large scale. It's usually strategically unsound to make decisions in haste and isolation, but in dysfunctional organizations that is often exactly what happens behind closed doors.When it comes to product development, we must all be willing to stand up and fight for open communication — and that means listening as much as it does talking.

So go out there and tell your boss you think she’s wrong. Tell that other team they need to consider outside perspectives. Tell them you see rocks ahead. Better yet, tell them you see a better way, because great managers love to hear solutions over complaints. At the very least, always work with them to find one.

Listen to experts and those “closest to the metal,” and discourage dogma at all costs. Bring other teams into the conversation and set a precedent for honest and blunt dialogue. People rarely see the peril of their own ways through the fog that surrounds the imaginary future — that's why we work in teams.

That's why we must always communicate and support the positive tension that comes as a result of open communication. Because we're stronger together. And making software is hard.

I've been working on an article about how honesty and communication is the solution to most of the problems that a product or team faces.

To write that article, I found it helpful to first list the most common problems large product teams face, particularly in enterprise software. I thought you might enjoy it, if only for your own commiseration and edification.

Strategy Challenges

Business model is wrong (e.g. selling a service that should be a product)

Bad margins per-customer (see above)

Ignoring a sea of unhappy customers

High costs due to internal "thrashing" (repeated pivots in product, design, tech, or strategy), leaving a team too weary to further correct course

Strategy team is too busy supporting sales to actually defend the product

Sales Challenges

Sales exist before product and thus heavily impact the product roadmap (yes, this was the arc of an entire season of Silicon Valley, and this practice is more common than you'd think)

Sales subsidizes development and thus, holds all the financial and political cards, steamrolling and ultimately unintentionally setting product roadmap

Sales distracts product leadership with exciting pre-sales deals, leading to a lack of product oversight

Sales is selling a vision of the product that is years away, but their runway with the customer's loyalty / their own reputation isn't that long (to paraphrase a wise and sarcastic friend, "never let reality impede your sale.")

Sales commitments outstrip organizational capacity

Executive Challenges

Leadership derails current efforts by making decisions behind closed doors that influence roadmap, tech, or design without understanding of the implications of their decisions

Design, development, strategy, or product teams do not have roles in the c-suite

Leadership is isolated or mislead by their own teams

Leadership is excited by a "bright shiny object," a holy grail mirage in technology, business, or design that distracts from the fundamentals of success

An unintentional test of frictionless payment over two weeks, on two continents, without a wallet

My bags were packed and I was about to walk out the door for a business trip—a week in Minneapolis followed by a week in London—and I did the classic phone-keys-wallet pat down. The wallet wasn’t there, and the car was already downstairs. Without time to look around, seeing as I was already cutting it close to my flight, I had to make a quick decision: cancel an important trip, or rely on Apple Pay for two weeks. I quickly redefined necessity; I had my phone and my passport, so I locked the door behind me and hopped in the back seat.

Is the investment in contactless payment worth it for retailers?

The fundamental question here is whether it’s valuable to invest in technology that, at this point in the game, relatively few customers are using. However, despite the fact that 92% of commerce—or possibly higher—still happens in physical stores, the allure of e-commerce is always growing. One way to match the convenience of online shopping? Making the payment process as simple and seamless as possible, and that means becoming an early adopter of cutting-edge technology. Not only are Apple Pay and its ilk more efficient, they’re also more secure as card numbers and identities are anonymized.

So, it’s clear that for the customer, the latest payment technologies are a huge upgrade. From a business perspective, the answer is less cut and dry. Customer card numbers are used to build spookily accurate customer profiles, which are a goldmine for targeted advertising; these contactless payment solutions deny them access to customer data by design. Then there’s the benefit of a proprietary system to dodge credit card fees. But at the end of the day, retailers’ core competency isn’t building technology, it’s selling products.

In the short term, it might be cheaper and less risky to build an in-house solution, but it hurts customers, and not just those of us who forget our wallets. Customers are already innovating faster than the industry can keep up. In fact, of active Apple Pay users, 80% are paying with the Apple Watch. In the long run it’s more valuable to think about the end user’s experience and rely on partners already living and iterating on the cutting edge to build the retail technology of the future.

Retailers should focus on creating the happiest path from intent to purchase, and the apex of that flow is the transaction itself. If a technology partner can help make every transaction better for the user (the customer), the only rational choice for retailers is to collaborate with them to create more modernized shopper experiences.